BARBARA ('BOBBIE') TERESA CECCHINI was born in Philadelphia, PA on New Year’s Eve, 1947 to Marion and Rocco Cecchini. It was her mother’s second marriage, and the newly born Bobbie had two half-brothers, Richard and Robert, who were eighteen and seventeen years older than her respectively.

 

Things started to go downhill as soon as Bobbie was born. Her mother lapsed into alcoholism, and Rocco didn’t hang around long enough to provide a firm rudder for his daughter. Marion went through a series of husbands, some real marriages and some common law. Bobbie lost count at eight, but none of her stepfathers could do anything to counter the depths of depravity to which Marion sank. She allowed her young daughter to be the sexual plaything of strange men in bizarre rituals in which pre-teen Bobbie was made to ‘dance for the gentlemen’ in seedy bars before being made to provide them with other ‘services’.

 

It was no surprise that her traumatic childhood of sexual abuse caused Bobbie great psychological harm, and during a period in her teens she spent two years living rough in a local park. Eventually, she found an outlet by joining the service. She enlisted in the U.S. Army, but turmoil continued to dog her. A spell in Vietnam as a medical specialist almost drove her over the edge and into the black hole of insanity. The carnage continued when she returned home. She was witness to the aftermath of a mass killing spree of women soldiers at an army base, an action for which she felt personal guilt for many years. She should have been on guard duty at the time, but sneaked out of the barracks to be with her boyfriend. In effect, even if she had been on duty she would have been one of the statistics. Females on guard duty were unarmed, and she would have been undoubtedly the killer’s first victim.

 

Murder and mayhem continued to stalk Bobbie when she made rare contact with her father, eagerly looking forward to seeing him for the first time in many years. The meeting took place, but it wasn’t the type she had hoped for. She was the first to discover his body on the steps leading to his dingy flat in downtown Philly. He had been murdered.

 

Unsurprisingly, Bobbie’s personal relationships with men were fraught with difficulty. She was married and divorced four times. It was during her last marriage, and at the age of forty-two, that she changed the course of her life to become a lady trucker. She says the years spent guiding 18-wheelers the length and breadth of America were the best of her life. Even a brutal rape on the road did not quell her enthusiasm for the open road.

 

Bobbie’s idyll was shattered when an innocuous back injury in late 1999 eventually led to her suffering from the rare and incurable spinal condition, adhesive arachnoiditis. She fought pain that was so intense that it often made her feel suicidal. Her weight ballooned, and she was warned that if she did not do anything about it, she would die of obesity.

 

With the courage and fortitude that had seen her survive the worst that life could throw at her, Bobbie, now of Rochester, MN, underwent a successful stomach-stapling operation. Weight loss eased the difficulty of life in a wheelchair, and Bobbie began to devote her life to helping others who, like her, had had trouble with Workers’ Compensation and other social benefits issues. She is a certified disability advocate, a Notary Public, a freelance writer, a full-time college student and her home-based agency is licensed by the State of  Minnesota.. She also has served on her local county advisory board for the Department of Corrections. Bobbie had to give up her  Home Health Agency called Cascade Care Services, Inc. due to her own increase in health issues. But she is still a member the Paralized Veterans of America (PVA), and also has been very active for the Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA), serving on the board, writing the newsletter and a being a member of the Color Guard when she lived in Detroit.

 

Bobbie enjoys computers, reading, desktop graphics design, fishing, shooting handguns, bingo, and her cat, Patches. But her greatest joy is her five children, Frankie, Lisa, Tina, Nicole and Sara, and her six grandchildren.